You're Going Down
by we were here
Summary: Slash. Ralph/Jack. If it were light shame would burn them at admitting these things. But the night was dark. One week has passed since the attempted rescue and the savage is out for blood; for a life; for revenge...


**Summary-**

Slash. Ralph/Jack. If it were light shame would burn them at admitting these things. But the night was dark. One week has passed since the attempted rescue and the savage is out for blood; for a life; for revenge...

**Rating-**

_T_ through _M_ for heavy angst/drama, a smidge of romance, violence and delirium.

**Disclaimer-**

William Golding owns _Lord of the Flies_. Sick Puppies owns _You're Going Down_.

**Author's Note-**

If you've checked out my profile over the last couple of days, you would know that this is my second _Lord of the Flies_ fanfiction and, basically, I'm pretty freaking pumped up. I've got the whole plot in my head—just have to fill in all the fuzzy details. I'm officially on summer break as of today and I'm hoping to get this story completed as fast as possible. There's no official time set for updates (yet) but I think if enough people hound on my ass then you might get two chapters a week—we'll see. Thanks for reading. Reviews always make me smile! :)

The link to the official playlist for _You're Going Down_ can be found either on my profile or below (just delete all the spaces):

www . playlist . com / playlist / 22005602315

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><p>CHAPTER ONE<p>

THE MEANING OF WAR

"Then there was that indefinable connection between himself and Jack; who therefore would never let him alone; never . . . If it were light shame would burn them at admitting these things. But the night was dark."

_Lord of the Flies_ (Chapter Twelve; Cry of the Hunters)

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><p>Fire.<p>

The island was on fire.

It was this very thought that somehow shoved itself through his brain and pulsed at the back of his eye that wasn't swollen shut. Miles away, over the cracking of ashes and a world—theirs—being burned alive down to the very last grain of white sand, he could still hear the screams, the raspy cries of savages scrambling over melting rock as they tripped over collapsing creepers' branches and finally sunk to their knees on the wet forest floor in defeat of a battle that would never be won.

Above them, the skyline was as pure as something so vile as black could possibly be. The red, orange and yellow flames were their only source of light though by now, it, too, was slowly eating them alive. The humid air reeked of anguish, death, redemption, revenge. Whenever one dared to breathe their lungs filled with charred wood and exhaled skin cells and hair follicles.

Hidden from the chaos, out of sight, out of consciousness, fingers wrapped around the hilt of an ignited spear sharpened at both ends—the tip now glowing faint embers that dissolved into the dirty space between fingernails bitten to the quick—so hard splinters tore open skin. Only when blood, hot and red and sticky, began to pool down his palms and wrists did he finally allow himself to turn away and stare across the horizon at a dawn that would never arrive.

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><p>Ralph had been having the same nightmare for days.<p>

Within days of escaping death, the only constant in Ralph's life had become unbalanced, leaving him feeling as if he reached out to pull back what little was left, a greater part of him feared that once he did, his fingers would just slip through empty air and he would have nothing to support him once he fell for good. Like walking on glass, it didn't matter if he took baby steps or left large holes behind—the glass would still be sharp and cool as ever, cutting him deeper than he thought possible.

So that was why, when Sam—who Ralph hadn't seen in several whole days, a whole horrifyingly long one-hundred-and-sixty-eight hours spent wide awake, staring through the creepers waiting for Jack . . . the savage . . . to beat him, to kill him, to do _something_—found him, paint washed off one side of his face and the other coated in dried blood and smears of fruit, Ralph had nearly sobbed in relief.

"Sam—," Ralph breathed, "What . . .?"

The young boy shook his head, rubbing at his eyes with the back of a dirty hand. "E-Eric," Sam choked out, chin wobbling and tears beginning to prick at the corners of his eyelashes, the corners of sanity. "They—he—Roger—said it wouldn't hurt—wouldn't hurt!—he _promised_—,"

Cheeks pink, Sam exhaled a shaky breath, trying to clear his head from the images of last night: of Roger stabbing his spear into the dirt next to Eric's head, then dragging it along the boy's throat harsh enough to cause a few drops of blood to squeeze out and stain the wood. Last night for not keeping watch of the littluns, Roger had punished Eric by having him shoved to the ground and kicked at in the stomach and everywhere else within the vicinity of only a few minutes. It was a punishment, Roger had sneered at the crowd forming round them on Castle Rock beneath the glow of embers burning bright, and if anyone tried to pull something like this again—the spear's tip breaking skin, a cry of panic and fear and pain from a hoarse throat—he'd be sure to, personally—more cries until it was all one could hear and then nothing but an eerie silence again as the body curled in on itself and lay still, so very still—hunt the offender down and kill him.

Now, as Sam unwound this tragic tale between gasps of burnt air and sobs, Ralph tried to piece together the little facts he could for fear that if he didn't and let the emotions, the guilt, swallow him from the inside out and takeover whatever little human part of him—however small or large that part may be—was left, he wouldn't be able to come back out alive. Because if Roger was capable of committing something so vile like this, then one only knew what Jack could, and would ultimately, do.

So Ralph just reached out to awkwardly pat Sam on the back, his body convulsing with tears neither knew how to maintain control of, and hoped to God that, wherever they were, Piggy and Simon heard their screams.

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><p>Night was black, hanging over the island like a noose waiting to be pulled. At this hour the lagoon was completely still. Creepers swayed in the omniscient breeze of hot air, sticky and suffocating. Sometimes, if you listened close enough, you could hear a beast's hooves faintly trotting off into the burrows of shadow and safety in the small increments of space spent by tribe members. On Castle Rock, boys off all sizes and age lay on their backs or stomachs, crowding over one another, silent as they dreamt of meat and blood, fingers laced round stubs of spears ready to use at the first ululation of danger or revenge.<p>

Buried underneath a canopy of leaves and shadow, the chief lay on his back on a reserved segment of the Rock overlooking a chunk of the island and the sea. Almost two weeks ago a small boy screaming about a body on a hill was killed; days later, a fat boy was squashed to pieces by a boulder, red and rumbling and crashing its way through the forest; and suddenly, at this very moment in time, the last boy—the _ex-chief_—was running for his life, one the chief amused to be very lonesome and humorously frightening to the eye. It was sad to know that he had been the cause of all this destruction in the first place, but something so beautifully powerful as this ability to control and to kill only lasted so long—it would be a complete waste if he just let it all slip away and act like it never happened at all.

Maybe that was why the chief found himself staring up at the midnight sky, images of not the past two weeks' events fluttering behind open eyes but instead of a single face; one blurred and bloodied and mortifyingly_ real_ the pit in his stomach burned. A face, a boys'—blonde wisps of hair hanging over colorless eyes that took in everything and gave away nothing; high cheekbones chiseling out a Roman nose and a pair of lips, oddly plump and rose-pink split open into a perfect 'o', his name on the tip of a tongue dripping gold saliva . . .

The chief rolled onto his side, hoping in doing so that the bile in his throat would go back down. It was wrong, so _wrong_, to think about another boy like this, let alone an outcast—the _enemy _for Christ's sake! The chief was not only separated from everyone else on the island by his fierce passion for killing and savagery but for his desires: thick and messy and unexplainable, like trying to see the other side of the road through fog. Each day pained him more than the last; to send out the littluns made his head spin and his heart beat in his ears. It was a feeling of aching desire that haunted him through sleep, dead to the world; through anger and hunting; through the few waking hours he spent alive fighting an inner battle with his consciousness of want and need.

The chief had tried to kill the stranger by sending Roger and the littluns out with a spear sharpened at two ends. For reasons still unbeknownst to him, the plan had failed and he'd been left with a curse croaking from his lips—a name? his?—and of his lungs sliding down his ribcage that dreadful morning as he watched from behind the weaving jaws of creepers as the devil himself dropped to his knees at the sign of a golden badge.

Exasperated with rage and disbelief, the chief had taken a sharp breath in and turned to his side; where, then, Roger had been standing at his side, the expression in his eyes hidden by the glare of the sun beating down on their heads. The inside of his mouth coated with dry blood, the melting paint shifted into a child's worst nightmare as the chief opened his dry lips and sneered, "Who is_ that_?"

Roger shook his head dumbly, wiping the back of his left hand—the right clutched the spear at his side—across his forehead and squinted to make out the objects slowly shifting into a person along the horizon, a gesture oddly reminding the chief of Piggy and his specs. "Don't reckon I seen 'im before, Chief."

The chief's throat burned from remembering; his teeth ached from not telling. But from telling what? There was nothing but a fly's wings buzzing in his ear and a voice faintly screaming his name, growing louder and louder in pitch as each agonizingly long second passed by, telling him to stop, Jack, please just _stop!_—

He shook his head to dissolve the thoughts of the night's previous events and wrung his wrists to make sure the blood was still flowing through his veins. Behind the two young men a group of littluns had somehow found their way around the tight space of cynicism and had began to whisper, some even choking on their own tears. The chief watched, amazed and in some dizzying sense of a coma, as the shapes in the distance—from what he could see now was the trim of a cruiser, a middle-aged man and the boy he'd been trying to run off the edge of the island, him, yes, _him, _oh, God, so close—his fingertips itched with electricity—as the boy dropped to his knees and wept, long, huge gasps that seemed to swallow the whole island inside his turmoil; while the man, embarrassed, turned his head away, his eyes—tauntingly all-knowing as the rotting boar on the stick—locking on the chief's, so hollow and empty the chief had to lower his eyelids in defeat.

Around them, the sobbing grew and grew, louder and louder in pitch. Uncomfortable, the chief swallowed. Somewhere, throughout all of this, a littlun's question tore him from his thoughts. "What are we to do now, Chief?"

The chief hadn't answered—not when the littlun had asked again; not when Roger had asked him three days later because, in truth, there really _was_ no answer. Maybe this was why, before his dreams ceased his last thought; the chief wondered if, somewhere, Ralph was thinking of him, too.


End file.
